Sea Change Robert B. Parker
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The fifth entry in Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series, Sea Change, is an excellently paced murder mystery with snappy tough-guy dialogue (though this grows a bit tiresome) and great action. Former L.A. police officer Stone is now the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, and has been on the wagon for a whole year. During the annual Race Week for sailing vessels, Stone is called to the scene of a woman found floating in the water. The book opens up with an exciting scene on a boat in a windy, rainy environment off Stiles Island:
“Florence stood and leaned over and raised the centerboard. It felt free to her. The boat slid slightly sideways. She let the board down. The boat stabilized, and came hard about, and the boom swung over the small cockpit and hit her a numbing blow in the chest knocking the wind out of her. She pitched over the side into the black water. It was painfully cold. She went under, gasping for breath, inhaling some of the water, choking on it. The boat didn’t head into the wind. It came straight on and the bow hit her in the chest and forced her under as the boat passed and sailed on. She tried to scream but she choked on the seawater. And then she went under and choked some more and lost consciousness.”
After finding the body on the surface of the water, Stone gets a promising lead on a boat gone missing. He finds the driver’s license of a Florida woman, and the case then flip-flops from a police procedural to a more forensic focus to a whodunit - and then, of course, the readers want to know the all-important why, why, why! Parker’s pace and plotting are a superb as ever, the only downfall being the overly cocky dialogue. Sea Change is ultimately a fun and fulfilling mystery that Parker fans will thoroughly enjoy.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Bobby Blades, 2006
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